example. For Chrome River’s many legal sector clients, the company uses previous year benchmarks, particularly in the area of reducing expense that cannot be billed back to clients. “Our number one goal when working with a client is establishing what their busi- ness model is and how they are trying to improve on their business processes and cost control, and we do a tremendous amount of consultancy to help them design an expense policy,” says Becknell.” The first step in such consultancy is to get the client to send Chrome River their existing policy. At this point, many compa- nies get embarrassed about sharing their outdated policies. “Don’t be embarrassed – we’ve seen them all,” says Becknell. “We highlight areas where policy is outdated based on something that might have been a statutory requirement in the past, but is not today. We also highlight areas where there is a gap in their policy, based on best practice – and help them understand that those gaps allow employees to submit for expense because they weren’t told they couldn’t.” For smaller companies, Chrome River
provides a template T&E policy that can be used as a starting point to develop a policy that suits their own needs. Concur also offers template policies for companies of this size. “We have the ability to give our customers templates that they can put into place, with slight tweaks here or there, within a matter of weeks,” says Concur’s Alistair Kent.
CASE STUDY GOING PAPERLESS AT FIELDFISHER
LEADING LAW FIRM FIELDFISHER has offices in London, Manchester, Brussels, Hamburg, Paris, Munich, Shanghai and Palo Alto (California), and was looking to move away from a manual routing and approval workflow process. It was looking for quicker turnaround of reimbursements, and the ability to change routing rules and policies quickly. The company’s then- finance director Sarah Wilkinson and financial controller Ian Le Masurier chose a combination of Chrome River’s Expense
and Invoice modules to automate the process, citing the company’s “deep understanding of the legal industry”. The roll-out of Chrome River was conducted in phases, with Expense being implemented first. The finance team promoted the launch of Chrome River with regular email updates to all users. The firm held group training sessions for the lead secretaries (super users) and offered ‘at your desk’ training for partners and fee earners. All users were provided with a training manual for reference.
34 BBT CORPORATE CARDS SUPPLEMENT 2016
During the Expense implementation, the finance team dual-posted expenses for two months to test that all the business and routing rules were working. Then, the firm set up two pilot groups that used Expense for one month before it was rolled out to the entire firm. Invoice was rolled out company-wide in early 2014.
“The system has met the firm’s goal of eliminating the cost of manually routing paper forms for approval by multiple people in multiple offices,” says Fieldfisher.
“Our number one goal when working with a client is establishing what their business model is and how they are trying to improve their processes and cost control”
That template has been created from benchmarking existing clients to see what works best. One example of this is that the company knows from its own data which fields should be included in an expense claim. For enterprise customers, Concur offers consultancy services whose cost depends on how many countries are in a corpo- rate’s programme, the complexity of the tax situation in those jurisdictions, the number of employees and the extent of its travel. Consultancy can be provided on a sectoral basis across various fields from pharmaceuticals to energy and fast-moving consumer goods.
As the cost of non-core travel starts to become more significant, particu- larly airline ancillaries, benchmarking has never been more important. If you don’t want another travel buyer to take the bragging rights, it may be time to act on expenses.˜
WHAT’S NEW IN EXPENSE MANAGEMENT
• VAT AND T&E COMPLIANCE CONSULTING FIRM MERIDIAN GLOBAL SERVICES AND CHROME RIVER have signed an alliance agreement to help the latter’s growth in the EMEA region, and offer an integrated expense submission and reporting, and VAT refund processing solution.
• TRAVELDOO has added new functionality to its mobile app, including an automated VAT calculator and a new visual summary view for submitted expenses. The Expense Checkout feature adds geolocation to enable users to search for a merchant (for example, a restaurant) or a place (such as parking) by address, and to filter them by category.
• AT ITS 2016 FUSION CLIENT EVENT, CONCUR announced it was extending its partnerships with a number of app partners, including VAT reclaim company Taxback International, to integrate with its Concur Invoice processing platform.
• ONLINE EXPENSE MANAGEMENT COMPANY WEBEXPENSES has signed a deal with cloud-based accounting platform Xero to integrate its expense management solution. Expense claims on Webexpenses can now be added to Xero with a single click.
• CHROME RIVER has launched a cross- device user interface, called Mercury, based on HTML5. The company says this will allow it to offer the same level of functionality across all platforms.
• AUTOMATED EXPENSE MANAGEMENT COMPANY EXPENSIFY has opened a UK sales office to help with the company’s European expansion. It is offering free expense management for the rest of 2016 for companies that sign up before the end of May.
• USERS OF TAXI AND RIDESHARING COMPANY UBER can now automatically send their business travel invoices to their Expensify account for reimbursement after the two companies partnered in the launch of Uber’s new Auto-Expense tool.
• FRAEDOM has entered into a partnership with Thomson Reuters Elite to allow the latter’s users – typically professional services and legal firms – to gain greater insight into their indirect spend.
In association with
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36